Saturday, 21 October 2017

DUBLIN CLERGY IN DISARRAY

The repeated failure to publish annual clerical changes is having the effect of hiding how the Archdiocese of Dublin is struggling with serious manpower shortages, clergy have said.

2017 will be the second successive year when diocesan changes have not been made public, concealing the extent to which sick and retiring clergy are not being replaced across the diocese.

Late developments in terms of priests falling ill or needing time out had affected the process, one priest told The Irish Catholic.

“There were three or four of those, and all you need is three or four to wreck the whole thing because it has a knock on effect,” he said, adding: “Increasingly we have an aged profile of priests in the diocese and we have guys who are starting to show serious signs of mental and physical burnout, and therefore as early as Christmas and as late as July and August, Archbishop (Diarmuid) Martin’s headache is twisting and turning constantly,” he said.

A second priest said the failure to publicise changes is obscuring how bad the diocese’s manpower shortage is.

“It’s very hard to discern what exactly is happening,” he said, adding that declining religious practice has not offset vocational shortages. “The work has increased, insofar as even if people are not coming to Mass every Sunday, or even just once or twice a year, when they die or when they want a child baptised or that sort of stuff, they still come to the parish,” he said.

While acknowledging the complexity of clerical changes, another priest described the failure to publicise changes as “irritating”, and damaging to diocesan transparency.

“It doesn't help what all of us are trying to do is help people be aware that the changing dynamics, particularly in numbers of clergy and appointments of clergy,” he said, adding: "At the moment we don't have enough priests staffing for the appetite of the people for ministry and service.”

A fourth priest said: “I think people are not aware of how serious it is. If you go through our parishes here and look at the priests, most of them are people are semi-retired.” The diocese, he said, is “going off a cliff”.

No new students entered clerical formation from the archdiocese this year.

PAY SAYS:WHAT IS GOING ON WITH DIARMUID MARTIN ???1. He refuses to publish his clerical appointments and keeps them "secret"!2. He has dismissed the Diocesan Appointments Committee which used to recommend clerical appointments to him and now does it all himself - that is when he is not travelling abroad!3. He appears to show a favouritism towards gay priests or gay priests who have been caught with "their trousers down"!4. He has caused great confusion over Maynooth etc and to this day Dublin clergy are unsure if Diarmuid will attempt to ordain Gorgeous next month.Diarmuid was never close an kind to his priests in Dublin but he has withdrawn more and more from them as time has gone on.Now that he is within a couple of years of retirement he is acting like a remote and secretive landlord and no one knows what the plan for the future is.On top of this, there was NO SEMINARIAN for Dublin this year - a diocese with hundreds of parishes and clergy.The priests feel that Diarmuid is trying to hide the decline and the crisis behind curtains of almost total non-transparency.This is creating a total loss of certainty among the Dublin priests and is leading to lowering of the morale that has almost been at rock bottom for quite some time.While Diarmuid is speaking out in the media about all kinds of issues he is allowing his own diocese to crumble.Alongside this, he is constantly touring the world attending meetings and giving lectures to everyone else about how the world and Church should be.It's like a having an interior designer that is going around making beautiful suggestions about other people's homes when your own home is in a state of disrepair and chaos.There is only one answer to this crisis - DUBLIN NEEDS A NEW ARCHBISHOP - AND IT NEEDS HIM NOW!

No.. he is fine.. but the suggestion was made in the newspaper article that his apparent secrecy about clerical appointments was more about the embarrassment of disclosingthe number of parishes where cover was very sparse as the number of available priests became smaller and the average age was a lot older. But it's not just Dublin has that problem and he would be better to publish the fixtures and let everyone see the truth.

Diarmuid Martin is not a mystery wrapped in an enigma. He is quite transparent and brutally frank. When he was appointed to Dublin and heard that Kevin Doran had been mooted as AB and when he heard the entirely untrue rumours that Kevin had supposedly said, "If that b****** is appointed, I'm outa here!" he immediately set about dethroning Kevin Doran right out in the open.

Dutiful and serious Vocations' Director Kevin was slowly taken down pegs. His relationship with the Dublin diocese seminarians was first to be undermined. Diarmuid's representative with the Dublin seminarians was dispatched to Maynooth to inform them that they were no longer to have any contact with their former Vocations' Director, none at all.

Kevin Doran was then banished to the furthest reaches of County Wicklow - St. Kevin's in Glandalough - the Siberia of the diocese where he could bury any of his ambitions.

Diarmuid is transparent when he doesn't like a priest, particularly one who is serious, intelligent, highly educated and a threat to his standing.

What a shocker that the Vatican resurrected Kevin Doran and made his a Bishop. The atmosphere between these two must be riddled with pretend charity at the best of times.

Meanwhile, if you take openly Gay and misbehaving priests who have collected many verbal and written complaints from laity - Diarmuid bristles against the fact that lay people will have the temerity to criticise a member of his troupe - that Gay priest who is misbehaving will Not Be Moved.

That is Diarmuid in a teacup. Brash, decisive, overbearing and arrogant - but with an eye ever on media handling. But his priests are too afraid ever to openly criticise his style or his behaviour. They are wholly complicity in Dublin's disarray.

I don't think the priests of the Dublin diocese are to blame. If St. Francis of Assisi were appointed Archbishop of Dublin tomorrow his appointment would make no difference to Dublin.

Even if 50 young men offered themselves to the Dublin Archdiocese it would take at least 7 years for these young men to be ordained and the possibility that they would get through Maynooth is not certain.

The shortage of priests in the Dublin Archdiocese will only be solved by the importation of African or east European priests and this will happen very soon.

This has nothing to do with Diarmuid Martin and everything to do with the fact that Dublin is not a very Catholic city. Jackeens don't want Catholicism and they don't really want priests either.

AB Martin's fiefdom - St. Mary's Pro-Cathedral - has hosted a silent civil war for almost ten years now. He got rid of Canon John Flaherty to Mourne Road and replaced him with the untouchable and highly opinionated Canon Damian O'Reilly who took a famously instant dislike to the famous Twins - the consecrated virgins Gemma and Triona King.

There followed one of the most bitter battles fought the Dublin diocese in many years. Damian brutally began every effort to oust The Twins from their years old sacristy and flower-room duties, removing their names from reader and communion minister rosters, finally removing their keys and telling them straight he didn't want them around the Cathedral where Cardinal Desmond Connell had presided over the consecration of their lay virginity some years before.

It was brutal. It brought both verbal and written complaints right to Diarmuid's face in his office on AB's House.

Diarmuid made many promises to rectify what was clearly going wrong in the Pro - he made promises directly to prominent lay persons' faces. He did not answer the letters sent to him, nor those handed to him by his AB House staff.

He did Nothing about Damian O'Reilly's behaviour for YEARS, long before the Gorgeous photographs and activities in the parochial house came to light, and nothing directly after that either.

He lost a Sacristan during this time who had complained a number of times in writing to him about Damian, and the sacristan was ousted with a financial settlement and a legally binding non-disclosure agreement about matters pertaining to bullying and other activities in the Pro - all the while Diarmuid was preaching morality to the masses and via his powerful media allies.

He's an Operator, is our Diarmuid and he gets away with it.

Stories of BULLYING will out in due course. They are overdue already, only because the priests under him are utterly spineless and afraid for their hierarchical futures.

Why do people get their smalls in a twist over the so-called 'shortage of priests'? How many more times must I say this: THERE IS ONE (and only one) 'priest', Jesus, the Christ. And he is NEVER in short supply.

MC, Jesus Christ is our Great High Priest but He Himself has chosen to allow others to participate in His Ministry - albeit imperfectly and in a limited way. God has always called people to minister to His people in His Name and with His mandate and authority. Those who minister in God’s Name are given enormous responsibility and from them even more is expected on account of the trust placed in them.

Begorrah hand that guy Magna a banana! He’s cracked it! Solved the age old problem! What an eureka moment!

Jesus Christ never returned to the Father at all after his earthly ministry was over. He didn’t really mean the disciples and apostles to carry on his work, despite everything he said that indicated otherwise.

He was hiding in the wings all along, just waiting for the moment it would dawn on anonymous expert on absolutely everything - “Magna Carta”.

So Catholic priests and Protestant ministers, don’t bother showing up tomorrow. Jesus will say the Mass, lead the Service, preach the sermon, etc. All of you can now retire. You are redundant. Jesus in the house! Thanks MC for this earthshaking epiphany.

12:38, one of the greatest, self-serving myths on Roman Catholic priesthood (its training ground, seminaries, the pale equivalent of Hogwart's School for Wizardry...without the impressive pyrotechnics, of course: illusion can stretch human credibility only so far) expressed by the Vatican is portentously and self-regardingly stated in its 'DECREE ON THE MINISTRY AND LIFE OF PRIESTS' (a Vatican II Council document):

'Thus Christ sent the apostles as he himself had been sent by the Father, and then through the apostles made their successors, the bishops, sharers in his consecration and mission.'

How did the Father 'send' his son? Well, he didn't send him, of course, cos there is only one God, and he doesn't order himself about. No; God had a Word, so to speak, with himself and agreed with himself to become fully corporeal and teach those wayward human beings what he had been trying to teach them for a millenium or three through these self-same people...except their savagery, bloodlust, homophobia, mysogyny, genocidal mania...and a host of other attractive personal qualities...kept getting in the way of his instructions.

In short, Jesus appeared to show us all what it truly meant to live and love. No one else could do it, because no one else was Jesus.

Are you getting the 'big picture' now. No one can be 'sent' as Jesus was 'sent', because that would make them Jesus, too. And then we wouldn't have three persons in one God, but a legion of personalities...and God does not have an amoeboid tendency.

So-called 'priests' cannot share in Jesus' ministry, because they cannot do what Jesus did: they cannot heal the sick; they cannot still the storm; they cannot multiply foodstocks; they cannot raise the dead; they cannot forgive sin. Because they are not Jesus.

What 'priests' teach us about themselves and 'priesthood' is an elaborate deceit to enhance their sense of personal worth, and to have everyone else so grateful for condescending even to look at them that they will not look at their obvious failings (and we all know what they are) and keep crossing their palms with lots of silver.

These comments of yours, yet again, reveal your lack of intellect - despite all your boasting to the contrary.

These comments are crass, cynical and motivated by extreme prejudice. Your remarks are pedantic and fundamentalist. They betray an obtuse mindset. No true academic would make such remarks and then try to pass them off as “learned”.

It goes without saying that priests are not Jesus. Good grief! They are nevertheless SENT! “As the Father sent me SO AM I SENDING YOU”.

Your attitude towards priests is incredibly prejudiced and deeply offensive to Catholics like me, who have known many good and faithful priests who were not looking to have their palms crossed with silver, who were truly other-centred decent men.

You also obviously regard Catholics like me with studied contempt and are unable to approach any theological subject with an objective and balanced mind. You are at the mercy of your bigotry and virtually all of your contributions are heavily jaundiced.

Your attitude beggars belief and I am not going to waste my time any further with you. Your sole purpose on this website seems to be to give gratuitous offence, to as many people as possible, as often as possible.

09:31, I absolutely agree with you. But yours is a wisdom Roman Catholic priests would, if they could, bury...along with you, and others like you, such is their inflated sense of self-regard and self-importance.

The Irish Catholic is totally hamstrung by AB Diarmuid Martin. Their Freedom of the Press was castrated by him to the point that they can only offer mouse squeaks of criticism and hope that some larger organ can take these up and amplify them.

Martin's masterstroke of sheer hypocrisy was in announcing with grave fanfare his removal of his seminarians from the toxicity of Maynooth long after those horses had bolted. Such hypocrisy and everybody fell for it! Fearless Diarmuid takes on Gaynooth!

Diarmuid was no sooner Archbishop of Dublin when he began to learn of 'strange goings on' in 2005 when the General Practitioner Felim Donnelly of Galway made a serious written complaint mentioning Ronan Drury et al and a 'homosexual ethos' abroad in Maynooth - not that Donnelly was anti-Gay, far from it for various reasons not mentioned here. He was concerned that the youngest seminarians from rural dioceses were being inveigled or forced into various forms of behaviour that they didn't understand and about which Maynooth's Seminary Council was appearing to do nothing. When he made his complaint to Dermot Farrell - suicidally - a copy of same landed on Diarmuid Martin's desk immediately since Maynooth is in his archdiocese. From this moment on - in 2005 - Diarmuid Martin was fully aware of allegations of 'strange goings on' in Maynooth which various seminarians felt strongly enough about to sacrifice their vocations in order to highlight them.

About these matter over the years Diarmuid did nothing and said nothing. It was only the news that a Dublin seminarian was going to make a Garda complaint that suddenly motivated Diarmuid to make his utterly surprising move to remove his handful of seminarians from the relatively slightly poisonous corridors of Maynooth to the highly poisonous streets of Caligula's Rome, and all to be seen to be the Irish Bishop who acted, while his fellows did nothing.

Diarmuid will sell his fellow bishops down the Swanee in a second to protect Diarmuid.

God Bless you Diarmuid, you are a Man who looks after Number One at all times and in all places! You surrounded yourself with loyal sycophants and that has done Dublin a power of good for all to see.

01:12, all I can say about Ronan Drury is that during my time at Maynooth he never said, or did, anything remotely 'inappropriate' to me (and I was one of those good-looking, fair-haired, blue-eyed, slim boys (still am, actually😆). Nor did I hear of ANYTHING even remotely 'inappropriate' of him concerning any other sem. .

If there is ever an audit of written complaints received in Archbishop's House, Dublin, allied to verbal complaints made face to face to Diarmuid Martin since 2004, it will be a shocking revelation to Martin's media admirers that a very great many of the complaints generated neither acknowledgements nor replies - but since there is never going to be an audit of how Martin has failed to address complaints - just for example over St. Mary's Pro-Cathedral matters - he can do as he pleases and thumb his nose at both priest and lay people until he retires to obscurity.

How does this aberrant, arrogant and ignorant behaviour of many years square with his liberal and thoughtful media profile?

He does not like and will not like people who complain, be they priests or lay persons - all go into his Black Book never to see the light of day.

Nor will there ever be a Dublin Diocesan admission of the number of Non-Disclosure Agreements allied to financial settlements entered into during his reign in Dublin. There hangs a sorry, shoddy morality tale.

The one diocesan change that was certainly announced by AB Diarmuid Martin concerned his new Vocations Director - Enda Cunningham - a Maynooth former Junior and Senior Dean of Discipline and involved up to his neck in various rows with seminarians such as not being allowed to kneel during the consecration at Mass and always involved in sending reports to Bishops killing off any vocations he deemed unsuitable in his infallible judgment. He was there for all the wasted time of Dr. Felim Donnelly and his monumental complaint.

How Martin can maintain on the one hand his objections to Maynooth's 'strange goings on' and its poisonous atmosphere for seminarians and then appoint that Stalwart of Maynooth for many years - Enda Cunningham - as the Dublin Diocese Vocations' Director - shome mishtake shurely?

You distrust Maynooth one minute, Diarmuid, enough to move out your twosome of seminarians while afterwards trusting Maynooth to the extent that you give the role of Vocations' Director to Maynoothite Cunningham - just how dumb do you think Irish and Dublin Catholics are?

Many an accessory will endear themselves to investigators to see if there is sufficient evidence for them to be caught. Martin clearly thought you might have evidence to catch him being involved with Gorgeous, at what level is anybody's guess!

Sensible move Pat. And in not allowing comments that provoke the supreme provoker, Magna, I trust that you will also censor his ubiquitous, nasty, caustic put downs! Thanks. Interesting blog today. There is much that can be said positively about DM but his priests are mostly demoralised because of his dictats, his sycophantic "shoe" lickers, his utter lack of genuine concern and constant absence. One way to survive is simply - do what we believe to be the right and caring thing for the parish entrusted to us.

What is it with you, Pat, that you feel the need to babysit that obnoxious piece of work? Is he paying you? Does he have compromising photos of you? The best way to not “provoke” Magna is not to publish any of Magna’s comments. Give us all a break from his rants for about a month - or permanently!

The little play going on between Pat Buckley and MC is interesting, similar to the following scenario:

Pupil in class is a bully.

The bully charms the teacher and constantly flatters him (MC: “I can only approach you, Bishop Pat, on my knees”).

The bully is also smarter - more clever - than the teacher.

So the teacher doesn’t notice the bully bullying the other students. Chortles at his outbursts (sure isn’t he a holy terror altogether). Turns an indulgent eye towards the bully and blames the victims of the bully for “provoking” the bully.

Thus the bully can go his merry way to his heart’s content, aided and abetted by the enabling and protective “teacher”.

If management which has no accountability is faulty the organisation will suffer. The truth has to come to the surface sooner or later. As always it is the ordinary people who suffer and have been suffering unknowingly for years

I was at a Dublin clergy gathering in All Hallows, a few year back. The event was followed by a meal. I was seated with Dublin parish clergy. They came across as angry, sarcastic, disillusioned, hopeless and very unhappy. trying to make conversation was an uphill struggel;no topic I tried to introduce was met with approval. It left a very very bad impression. I am not suprised no one wants to join them.

Pat, your focus is too narrow. Every diocese in Ireland is in the same mess as Dublin. We have some decent bishops but as a collective body the Conference of Bishops is a disaster. The majority of priests are now aged over 65 and what does the Irish Church want to do? Import clergy from Poland, Nigeria, Kenya and so on! It will solve nothing.......culturally we are so different and also, most of the Polish priests already working here will not engage with anyone unless they're also Polish - they haven't got a personality between them, while the Nigerian priests are a shower of lazy so and so's who wouldn't know a decent day's work if it sat beside them! It's very easy for bishops to import priests because they don't have to work with them, spoon feed them or clear up the messes they leave when the clash with parishioners. Yes, it all sounds racist, some will say, but it's the reality we need to keep in mind here rather than a so-called quick-fix solution. The Irish Church needs to get off its backside and start looking at solutions from within.PS I'm a priest so I have some idea how the system works.......or doesn't!

I totally agree with the Priest at 16.32 because I have worked too with both Polish and Nigerian Clergy for sometime. Has commentators at 17.12 or 18.26 share the same experience? I think not. Many Polish Clergy do stick together and are only interested in people who are Polish from my long experience of them. They constantly talk in Polish together at clergy gatherings and I believe this to be very sneaky and ignorant. They make no attempts at befriending the native Clergy and they become almost a clique among themselves. They import their harsh right wing religious attitudes from their native land upon parishioners here. They also prove to be arrogant in their attitudes and way of life. As for the Nigerians, where do I begin? The fact they have a Nigerian Nuncio now have made them even more smug than before. Yes, I agree, with experience of most of them they do tend to be lazy and have an air of superiority over other Clergy (heavens knows why). Before the racist brigade get offended it's far from being racist. It's only an observation of the experience of working with these Priests. They don't understand our culture nor do they want to, they can be homophobic and have problems accepting women as their equals. It's not such a rosy prospect to import Clergy from other places to tackle the shortage of Priests.

16:32 might be a bit harsh on foreign priests but he's spot on in saying that importing priests is not the answer. I tend to see more problems with both cultural differences and problems with pronunciation and dialect......it is impossible to understand most of what's been said by foreign priests and, as a consequence, people just switch off.

16 32. Your comments are distinctly racist. If you are a priest you don't deserve the faculty of celebrating the Eucharist which compels you to recognise the equality, uniqueness and dugnity if every human being. As a priest I am glad of the help and support of my African colleagues. On this Mission Sunday perhaps you need to reconsider your "mission"!! Outrageous comnents.

The poster @19.26 immediately presumes that the previous posters must "have no experience"of working with priests of other cultures.He is wrong about that. Could the problem for him lie in that arrogance which is maybe palpable to his visiting colleagues?

I know a Nigerian priest who is a very holy and hard working man. He speaks the truth with love and gives excellent counsel after confession. Far better than some of the mumbo jumbo caught-in-a-sixties-time-warp that I have had to endure from many Irish priests with zero spirituality.

Those four Dublin priest quoted in the article are proper loons if they are upset that they haven't received a list of personnel changes. The up to date list of appointments is printed in the Diocesan Guidebook each year. Most priests hear of diocesan changes as they occurred by text message. Regarding DM ignoring and then dissolving the appointments board it was about time he did so. That "old priest" Fitzpartick who was up to his neck in shite in the Diocese for the best part of a generation and who appointed himself and his "pets" to posts of responsibility is responsible for a lot of the mess in the Diocese. At least and at last DM copped on and began to ignore the Auld Queen Fitzpatrick and the loon appointments board.

Imported priests is not the answer and the Church in Ireland know this. As priest numbers fall so too are the numbers in the pews. The future of the Church in Ireland is changing and will dramatically change over the next number of years. We will have less priests and less churches. We will have smaller church attendance but people will be stronger in their faith. It is Ireland past where people go to mass because their ma or granny said so. People in future will go to mass because they want to share in the celebration and community life of the church / faith centres.

Importing foreign priests will empty the pews even more quickly.

I was at mass this evening and the transitional deacon was from Asia. I couldn't understand most of what he said. If this was regular I would not go to that church anymore. I would go somewhere else.

Most foreign priests are from orders and not secular clergy. The secular priest is the man who needs to be in the parish, the religious off out carrying on their mission / teaching / retreats etc.

Its ironic that we are talking about foreign priests, this weekend is Mission Sunday.